


Unexpected Potential

by Dawnwind



Category: Numb3rs
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-14
Updated: 2011-04-14
Packaged: 2017-10-18 02:10:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/183833
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dawnwind/pseuds/Dawnwind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Missing scene for Janus List</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unexpected Potential

"You brother used an unorthodox method to subdue the suspect," the head of hospital security said with a mixture of admiration and amazement.

"That's Charlie, unorthodox." Don ran one hand through his hair, staring at the MRI scanner room without comprehension. The tension in his gut hadn't let up since Charlie's unnerving phone call twenty minutes earlier. He'd half expected to find his brother shot in the back of the head in the ICU, ex-secret agent Taylor Ashby sporting a similar bullet wound right next to him.

Instead, after a high speed race to through Pasadena that he barely remembered, he'd arrived to a surprisingly contained scene. Police cars ringed the hospital and he'd been escorted immediately to the radiology department in the basement. "Where is Charlie? You said he wasn't hurt, why did he need an MRI?"

"He didn't need one." Martin Taber smiled. On his long face chased with deep sun-baked lines, a smile was probably a rare occurrence. "He gave one to Edgar Millhouse, the would-be assassin -- completely immobilized the guy until we could get there. Pasadena PD have Millhouse is in custody now." Taber gestured at the MRI. "How'd your brother figure out how to turn the magnet on? That's a complicated piece of machinery."

"Math," Don said succinctly. The good news hadn't assuaged his nerves one iota -- well, maybe just one. Charlie wasn't dead, he wasn't even hurt, thank God -- but how was he coping? Extreme situations had been known to send Charlie into a tailspin, right back into the comfort of unsolvable equations. "Where is Charlie?"

"He went back upstairs to the ICU with Ashby. The guy's dedicated -- and kind of hyper. He's not what I expected in an FBI agent."

"He's a college professor." Don gave the enormous white scanner room one last look and backtracked the way he had come. The elevator seemed to take forever to get down to the basement. Don took out his frustration by smacking the lit-up button repeatedly. Charlie had pointed out on numerous occasions that pushing the call button more than once did not make the elevator descend any faster than normally; it still had to traverse all the floors in between. Don didn't care, the aggressive action made him feel better. Like he was doing something, because so far, dammit, he hadn't accomplished much.

The whole case had been a major aggravation from the moment Taylor Ashby threatened to take out the bridge and specifically called the Eppes brothers to the scene. Don hadn't liked Charlie being that close to danger. If the bridge had actually blown up, even the FBI truck they'd been in would not have completely protected them from the blast.

Luckily, or not, only Ashby had been seriously harmed in the explosion. But the very nature of his existence -- a cipher inside a puzzle wrapped in a riddle had fired Charlie's genius in ways that other cases did not. There was no way Don could have kept his brother away from this one -- which hadn't worried him as much as it should have. He'd figured that if he could keep his eye on his brother -- either protected by the security of the FBI building or the special security detail Don had assigned to Ashby's hospital floor -- that Charlie would be safe.

How could he have been so stupid?

The elevator arrived with a cheery ping and the doors slid open, disgorging a gaggle of MRI personnel called in at the late hour to check over their precious equipment. Don heard snatches of their conversation when he pushed past them to get into the elevator car.

"Damaged, do you think?" a red-haired woman asked her companion worriedly.

"Shouldn't be used by untrained people..." the taller man said with disapproval.

 _Untrained._ That almost made Don laugh out loud. He wasn't at all sure how Charlie knew which buttons to push to power up the high-tech piece of medical equipment. But, he could wager a better than odds-on guess that Charlie had had some part in designing an algorithm that originally programmed the machine. Charlie seemed to have his fingers in so many pies, Don sometimes had to remind himself that Charlie was not his baby brother who couldn't fend for himself any longer. Charlie was an adult.

An adult who should not have been at the hospital after hours trying to ferret out illusive clues from the mishmash of numerical symbols and substitution codes that Ashby had left.

Don snarled when the elevator stopped on the second floor to let on a nurse, and stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets to stop himself from slugging the wall. The nurse gave him a wary look and hurriedly got off on the third floor. He'd scared her. He didn't really care because he was scared, too.

There lay the real truth.

He was scared. Terrified that Charlie had been killed.

The fear of it ate at his guts.

He was used to the chaos and adrenaline-edged tension of his job at the FBI. He expected to live on the edge of the knife, waiting every moment for something bad to happen. That was the way of his life, but family time was his sanctuary. When he came through the door of his childhood home, he was supposed to be able to let his guard down and relax.

Tonight, he'd gone over to the house, had dinner with his father and sat down to read Ashby's files, to let an hour or two of quiet seep into his soul. His cell phone interrupting that bliss was such a common occurrence that he hadn't even thought about not answering. He was on-call 24/7. Always had been, always would be.

Charlie's name on the miniature phone screen had lulled him into a false sense of security.

Charlie's innocuous words had chilled the blood in Don's veins. "Where's the guard?" he'd asked. Not even to Don, but to some poor nurse who should never have been mixed up in the danger in the first place.

Don had known, right then, right there, that his ability to protect Charlie from the world was smashed beyond belief. That, for once, he had to trust to the fates. And more importantly, trust Charlie.

Amazingly, that had apparently worked, although he wouldn't believe it until he saw Charlie in the flesh, clutching his beloved laptop with a whiteboard marker in his fist.

When the elevator stopped on the fifth floor for no apparent reason, Don started cursing. He had a very extensive vocabulary in English and Spanish, and recently, Colby had taught him some choice words in Afghani. Don didn't know the translations but the harsh consonants gave him something to chew on until the doors finally opened on the sixth floor.

The ICU was packed with uniforms; hospital security, LAPD and even some from the sheriff's department.

"Can't let you through, sir, this is a crime scene." A blue uniformed officer who barely looked old enough to be attending his high school senior prom stood resolutely in front of the main passageway.

"Special Agent Don Eppes, FBI." Don flipped his badge in the boy's face and pushed past him without an apology.

There was even more commotion inside the unit. Half a dozen doctors and nurses, plus the police, were about ten people too many for the narrow space between the nurse's station and Ashby's room. Don caught sight of Charlie's laptop on the table he'd been using for a desk since he broke the code, and the lump in his throat tightened to strangulation levels.

 _Damn._

He heard Charlie's voice a second later. Charlie sounded like he was on speed.

"So I deduced that the assassin," Charlie said rapidly. "What did you say his name was?" The detective's answer was over-ridden by Charlie's nervous chatter. "That Millhouse had less than a minute to make it through the wash area and the ante-room before he got to Ashby's room, so we had time to get away." He gulped in air. "Lois, the nurse, helped a lot, because, you know, sometimes I get so caught up in what I'm thinking about that..."

"Sir?" the detective sounded weary. "What made you--"

"Charlie," Don said softly.

"Don!" Charlie exclaimed, and for a split second, Don saw all the delayed reaction hit his brother. Charlie shuddered and went pale, looking lost. Then he inhaled with a preoccupied grin. "Detective -- uh?" he gestured at the policeman and then Don. "This is my brother, Special Agent Don Eppes of the FBI."

"Sergeant Eric Todd." The detective leaned forward to shake Don's hand. "I just have a couple more questions for the professor here."

"Be my guest," Don laughed, a little giddy at the sight of his completely unharmed brother, fully aware that 'a couple more questions' could take half an hour or longer with the loquacious Charles Eppes.

"Don, I lured that guy down to the MRI!" Charlie announced breathlessly, his color coming back in a rush. "Down the fright elevator, through these abandoned tunnels and in through the back door of the chamber." His hands danced on air, describing the action. "I didn't think he'd fall for it. Well, actually, probability factored into the equation, fifty-nine percent of all..."

And he was off, chattering away about statistics, numerical probabilities and mind-boggling facts that were making the detective's eyes glaze over. The long and short of it was that Charlie had managed to do what some trained agents could not have; brought down the suspect without violence and without harm to the man he was protecting. And apparently he'd gotten a rush from his success.

Who'd have guessed Charlie was such an adrenaline junkie? In retrospect, Don should have. The facts were there for all to see. Charlie was a speed demon -- the speeding ticket that had caused him to lose his original learner's permit proved that. Even without a legal driver's license, Charlie had won several go-cart races. The supposedly meek professor delighted in blowing things up. He'd once challenged convention by lying on a torturous looking bed of nails while Larry Fleinhardt smashed a cement block on Charlie's belly. Don couldn't even define his own reaction to that sight.

For all his supposedly logical thinking, Charlie frequently overlooked his own safety in the heat of the moment. Which made him far more like his older brother than Don ever wanted to admit.

And none of that assuaged Don's temper any. Edward Millhouse could have easily gotten away with murder. Charlie had been seconds away from getting his head blown off. That the assassination attempt was meant for Taylor Ashby and not Charlie didn't mitigate matters at all.

Someone with a great deal of power had hired Millhouse and Don had a very strong suspicion that this all could be placed at the feet of that bastard McClare. He'd undoubtedly ordered the hit and caught Charlie in the crossfire. That was not something Don was going to stand still for.

"And you didn't consider the MRI was dangerous used in the wrong hands?" Don heard Detective Todd ask, and he was jolted back into the conversation.

"Well, admittedly, I've never actually sequenced one during an actual medical procedure," Charlie said, pushing his curly hair back off his forehead. "But I've participated in multiple simulations to ferret out glitches in the system, so I just utilized the main..." He must have realized that Todd wasn't following and took a different tack. "Have you heard of the Lorentz force law?" When the detective shook his head with an expression Don recognized well -- that of complete and utter confusion, Charlie summed up his explanation using words his audience could understand. "I turned on the MRI. The -- uh -- guy after us was wearing metal, and he got stuck. Metal is contraindicated in a magnetic field."

Don had to bite his lip to hold in a sudden laugh. Charlie had amazing potential as an agent. He'd been cool in the heat of the moment, thought on his feet, and used logic and his astonishing brilliance to turn the tables on a professional hit man. How many other agents could claim that -- and on their first solo outing?

 _And what the hell was he thinking?_ Don almost smacked himself.

Charlie was no agent. He was a college professor in mathematics, for God's sake. While definitely not a run-of-the-mill teacher, he would never be an FBI agent.

Because Don didn't want him to be. Don had accepted the inevitable merging of their two worlds for the last three years, coming to terms with the melding of academia and investigations when Charlie's expertise was needed on a case. Not to mention Larry's insight, as well as his relationship with Megan. All of that had muddied the line between Cal Sci and the bureau considerably, but there was no way in hell that he wanted Charlie part of the FBI full time.

His belly clenched up hard again, raw emotion tangling in his guts.

Where did that come from? Could it hark back to their childhood and his impotent jealousy of Charlie's brilliance overshadowing his own accomplishments? He refused believe that -- he'd matured far beyond that kind of petty resentment. It was no longer big brother taking care of little brother; he simply wanted to shield Charlie from the kind of dark ugliness that he had to deal with day in and day out. Wasn't that enough?

"We'll need you to come down to the station to sign your statement once it's typed up," Todd said to Charlie. "Thank you for your time, Professor Eppes."

"I have a card with my office number." Charlie shoved both hands into his pockets with a distracted frown. "I should be carrying one. Some where."

"You gave me your number at Cal Sci -- and your home," Todd reminded him, backing away as if he didn't want to be sucked back into the vortex of words that Charlie could produce.

"Oh, good -- I'll be there." Charlie nodded, his focus already shifting back to the glass wall covered with his scribblings and the man in the hospital bed just beyond.

Don followed Charlie's gaze. Two nurses and a doctor hovered over Ashby. The old man didn't look well. His eyes were closed and he never moved when the nurses changed his bandages and took his vitals.

Charlie swallowed audibly and exhaled. "He could have died. That was cutting it really close."

"Too close, buddy, you should have..."

"But, Don, it was--" Charlie spread his arms wide, encompassing the whole experience as something akin to awe transformed his face. "Is this what you do? Is this why? When you're totally in the moment, sort of flying." He laughed self-consciously, his wild curls wreathing his head like a satyr in an ancient Greek drama. "I've had the sensation when I suddenly see the solution to an equation so clearly that there's a kind of high, but this... I had no thought for myself, no fear." Charlie waved his hands as if erasing a board. "No, that's not true, I was terrified, but it didn't matter because -- because I had to get him to safety. He was depending on me." He leaned back against the nurse's station, contemplating Ashby again. "I still can't believe..."

"You were great, Charlie. You saved his life," Don said gruffly. It wouldn't do to be overly demonstrative. Charlie was already practically bouncing off the walls. "I'm really impressed." He slugged his younger brother in the bicep, exactly where he used to when they were in high school and he wanted to show Charlie how proud he was of him without looking like a dweeb in front of the Pasadena High senior class.

Charlie beamed, the warmth in his eyes proving that he knew what the gentle punch really meant. "Dad called just before you got up here, he's on his way. You gonna stick around?"

"No, buddy, I've still got a job to do." Now that Charlie was safe, there was only one thing on Don's mind. Revenge wasn't totally his motivating factor, in fact, according to the FBI code of conduct, it had absolutely no place in the investigative process.

Don didn't really give a rat's ass. Once he cracked Millhouse, and discovered who his employer was, tracking the bastard down should be easy. McClare had to be the one. Snapping the cuffs on that bastard would feel very, very good indeed. "I'll be back late. You keep your nose clean and stay away from hospitals from now on, huh?'

"I've had enough excitement for one lifetime tonight," Charlie said quietly.

"Yours and mine both, bro," Don said, and did what he hadn't planned to. Hugged his brother. It was the one armed, we're-guys,-we-don't-gush kind of a thing, but it soothed something dark and scared inside him. And gave him the impetus to move forward.

FIN


End file.
